Modernism

Do we have the curiosity and the courage to face our own time? Can we learn to live with something new, something that is not a copy from the past?

Quote from May 7, 1966, from Toronto’s then mayor Philip Givens, in defense of installing Henry Moore’s Three Way Piece No.2: The Archer in front of the new Toronto City Hall -both pictured above. (Sourced from the accompanying material at the AGO‘s fantastic Moore collection.)

Givens defined Modernism in these two small sentences. He also gambled (and lost) his political career as Toronto mayor on this particular Moore masterpiece. A great bourgeois politician, indeed.